World Wrestling Entertainment responded to criticism of having John Cena call somebody gay for a laugh by teaming with the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation in an anti-bullying campaign. So, of course, it makes perfect sense that announcer Michael Cole would use Twitter to call his co-worker a faggot and receive no punishment!

That’s exactly what happened on Saturday morning, when Cole, who has seen an upswing of face time since turning heel and screaming about himself for two hours every Monday, responded to a tweet from fellow announcer Josh Mathews with the F-bomb. Cole quickly deleted the tweet and apologized, citing “being a character” as the reason for the taunt.

“I apologize to any and all who were offended by my tweet toward young Josh Mathews … It was obviously not meant the way it was taken.”

How was it meant to be taken? Well, let’s take a quick look at the history of homosexual tolerance in pro wrestling.

1941: Gorgeous George Wagner debuts his new “glamour boy” gimmick by dying his hair blonde, wearing a robe to the ring and acting effeminate, more or less inventing the idea of having an arena full of people boo you for being a “sissy.”

Shortly Thereafter: “Exotic” Adrian Street adds “being gay” to Gorgeous George’s gimmick, accentuating it with pastel facepaint, glitter and chains, and has a signature move where he escapes being pinned by kissing you, and you’re too overcome with shock/fear to continue wrestling. He also puts make-up on you when you’re incapacitated. Also, this:

1985: Adrian Adonis becomes “Adorable” on Piper’s Pit, transforming from a biker into a hair dresser/flower salesman who sprays perfume in peoples’ eyes and wears Christmas bows in his hair. Adonis eventually put lipstick on Piper, causing Piper to destroy Adrian’s flower shop with a baseball bat, shave his head and send him fleeing the WWF in shame.

1995: Goldust is introduced. Goldust’s original character was a guy who loved movies so much it made him a gay pervert. He infuriated heterosexual wrestlers by performing “mouth to mouth” on them, leading to a parking lot brawl wherein storied gay-basher Rowdy Roddy Piper attacked him with a bat, chased him in a white Ford Bronco and eventually stripped him of his clothing to reveal women’s underwear. Eventually Goldust started wearing fake breasts and a ball gag before contracting Tourette’s Syndrome.

1999: WWF debuts “Too Much,” a gay tag team. They become friends with a fat Samoan man in a diaper and get into hip hop, becoming “Too Cool,” and proving that homosexuality can be okay as long as they are constantly entertaining you.

1999: World Championship Wrestling’s Lenny Lane and Lodi form the “West Hollywood Blondes,” a tag team in pink triangle trunks who can’t stop seductively eating lollipops. They are eventually revealed to be brothers who, I guess, love having sex with each other.

2002: Tag team partners Chuck Palumbo and Billy Gunn begin showing homosexual affection to one another. Chuck proposes marriage to Billy, who accepts. GLAAD is so happy about this that they publicly applaud WWE and give Billy and Chuck a gravy boat as a wedding present. The wedding happens, but Billy and Chuck don’t go through with it, revealing that they aren’t REALLY gay, they were just pretending to be gay as a joke, and the idea of gay marriage is appalling to them. That leads to a couple of Samoan guys attacking, beating them up, then beating up some women.

Also 2002: WWE has a guy in developmental who is a former police officer and SWAT team member who was also a member of the touring Christian evangelist group The Power Team and won American Gladiators. What do they do with him? They put him in leopard print pants, cover him in glitter and make him “Rico,” the flamboyantly gay personal stylist of Billy and Chuck.

1997 – present: The Rock makes horrible fun of anyone who is effeminate or homosexual. He then threatens to take their possessions, turn them sideways, and insert said possessions into their ass.

2002 – present: John Cena continues The Rock’s work, making sure all heterosexuals feel shamed by his slowly spoken rap lyrics about how they are actually homosexuals.

2010: Orlando Jordan takes the gay gimmick one step further by squirting himself down with lotion in the style of a cumshot before matches, driving his opponents crazy because they can’t handle the idea that a man wants to have sex with them. Jordan is eventually teamed with a mentally retarded man and they become close friends, because the only person who could like an LGBT wrestler is a guy who doesn’t know any better.

And this is just the tip (the literal tip) of the iceberg. This list doesn’t include the world of Japanese wrestling, where a guy named Hard Gay hangs on with your kids on the playground and Danshoku Dino stuffs your head into the front of his underwear before piledrivering you. It also doesn’t contain a lot of the more subtle aspects of homophobia in wrestling, like the Midnight Express walking around on their knees and getting hugs around the waist when they needed support.

The worst part of the entire story is how Cole can just delete the Tweet, say he’s sorry and face the most minimum penalty imaginable (personal shame?). Let me put it to you this way: If I work at the Olive Garden and I call my co-worker a faggot, I don’t get to work at Olive Garden anymore. A secondary “worst part of the entire story” goes to the comments section on any website ever made, where you get one of two comments on repeat: One, that the word isn’t offensive, usually followed by the commenter facetiously using the word because the Internet is anonymous and you can do whatever you want wherever you want because REAL PEOPLE ARE NOT READING, and two, that the only reason people are upset about this is because Cole dared to “not be PC.”

If you’re reading this, do me a favor. The next time you start to type something about the “PC police,” think about how stupid you sound typing “grammar nazis” and stop it. Being upset about a major employee of a publicly traded company PARTNERING WITH GLAAD calling somebody a faggot online is not “being PC,” it’s being a sane, good-hearted human being. He didn’t misuse nomenclature here. He also didn’t say something was “gay” and get away with it because “that’s not what gay means anymore.” He called someone a faggot to hurt them for being weak or effeminate, and guess what? He should be punished. For real. End of story.

Join The Discussion

This is gonna sound gay, but I’d bet that Michael Cole has a very tender asshole.

03.28.11 at 10:51 am

Justin O'Connor

What’s even more ridiculous is that even if he’s punished in some unseen way, it’s not going to be on account of his bigotry. It’s gonna be because Vince is annoyed that his company is receiving bad press after announcing a partnership with “those whiny faggots,” because Vince is a Literal monster. Wrestling is the best at being the worst.

And don’t forget all the times that Torrie Wilson and Stacy Kiebler scissored. That may have been in my mind, though.

03.28.11 at 11:11 am

MenaceIISobriety

still more PC than “FIRST!”

03.28.11 at 11:26 am

tanbarkie

Well said, Mr. Stroud

03.28.11 at 11:44 am

Greene

You’re going to get a lot of people upset that this post doesn’t have enough jokes, but this is something that needs to be said and I’m glad you did. (Really considered saying “glaad you did”, but then… )

03.28.11 at 12:15 pm

Bowie

Hi Brandon,

Great post, and well thought out.

Didn’t Cole get ‘punished’ by going to sensitivity training sponsored by GLAAD.

I think this new social acceptance and defense of the homosexual community is fascinating and, in truth, something positive. As you astutely mentioned, characters with effeminite or abiguously gay actions in the ring have always been a hot button for fans. As you mentioned, hugging, whispering in your tag partners ear, and other subtle body language was used by heels to garner heat from the crowd.

Do you think the use of ‘homophobia’ will continue to be exploited by the wrestling business, like nationalism and ethnic stereotypes?

03.28.11 at 12:46 pm

Simon

Fantastic column.

I despise the “free speech, PC police” defence. Of course Michael Cole is free to use whatever language he wants. The majority of Americans are free to think that he’s both a bad person and, on a basic, fundamental level, a stupid, stupid man for doing so, and to become less of a fan of WWE programming as long as he’s the voice of the company. Which probably won’t be much longer.

On a side-note, it’s interesting that almost everyone you mentioned started as a bad guy but eventually became fan favorites. I don’t remember Lenny and Lodi being particularly talented at all, but they started to get super-popular in the last days of WCW. Billy and Chuck started getting great reactions leading up to the wedding, inexplicably. Rico was never exactly a star but he got really good reactions too, during that last run of his, and of course people love the Golddust. Sure, a lot of that is laugh at the wacky homos, but promoters keep expecting fans to be whipped into a rage by this stuff, and it really doesn’t happen.

03.28.11 at 12:47 pm

Philip

Ooo more wrestling history posts!

03.28.11 at 1:04 pm

FunkyWarmMedina

Brandon, that was perfect, man.

03.28.11 at 1:06 pm

Dave

This is a very well written article and I would imagine one of the few intelligent pieces on the subject you’ll be able to find online. I think Cole’s comment probably came from him being an idiot more than an attempt to be purposefully hateful, but if that is the case it probably means he used it as his ‘go to’ insult which is possibly just as bad. Either way, great timing there, idiot.

This is a serious subject but you still made the history of gay characters etc. in wrestling highly entertaining, and I laughed at the evolution of Too Much to Too Cool, as well as ‘storied gay-basher Rowdy Roddy Piper’.

Great article.

03.28.11 at 1:45 pm

Brian G.

@Simon Yeah, I seem to recall the crowd going NUTS when Lenny Lane won the Cruiserweight title.

Great article, well done.

03.28.11 at 1:46 pm

85

I think the internet reached the pinnacle of its possibilities with that Goldust paragraph. Absolutely hilarious.

03.28.11 at 2:14 pm

Rusty

Great article, B.

Hilarious AND informative, will be sharing with others! Too Much in the middle cracked me up, guess I never thought of them like that. Somehow.

I really feel like this has just exposed further what kind of person Michael Cole is in real life, I can just see and hear him saying that with some stupid grin on his face. I mean, we all heard him freak out on that radio show. Heel Michael Cole is just Michael Cole turned up to 11, minus the gay bashing.

So, the question I now present to you is this: is Michael Cole a great heel, or GREATEST heel?

03.28.11 at 2:53 pm

Patrick

“Being upset about a major employee of a publicly traded company PARTNERING WITH GLAAD calling somebody a faggot online is not “being PC,” it’s being a sane, good-hearted human being.”

Best line of the article. Sick of hearing “I can’t beat up minorities! IS THIS EVEN AMERICA ANYMORE?!?!?!” Yes, it’s still America, but not lynching your local minority group isn’t about freedoms or rights or political correctness, it’s about not making the world an even worse place to live.

03.28.11 at 5:29 pm

wagnike2

Wish it would’ve went into some details about Cassandro / various other exoticos in Mexico. But needless to say, interesting read.

@Bowie – “Do you think the use of ‘homophobia’ will continue to be exploited by the wrestling business, like nationalism and ethnic stereotypes?”

I don’t see any of that stopping, unfortunately. The easiest way to get a room full of people for or against you is to appeal to their lowest common denominator. Right now racism, nationalism and sexuality are subjects that everyone has an opinion on, hidden or overt, and putting them in a situation that allows them to feel what they feel without being the center of attention lets them spit it out. Being a member of a wrestling crowd is like being on the Internet – anonymity with someone watching.

03.28.11 at 7:05 pm

f. olby, esq

An elegant condemnation of something that desperately needs condemning. If nothing else, I guess we can take heart that wrestling is trending, ever so slowly (and only in WWE, really) away from physical gay bashing and towards figurative gay bashing. They should know better, and we should know better than to love them in spit of it. But alas, alack, etc.

03.28.11 at 8:02 pm

Destiny Talley

You are brilliant.

For some reason, I would have thought that the WWE governed what their superstars were saying on their character’s Twitter account, but apparently not.

03.28.11 at 8:37 pm

Andy

the difference between an olive garden job with gay slurs, and an entertainment job with gay slurs is that those of us working in normal jobs are that much more replaceable. But celebrities of any importance can get away with things ranging from using the word “faggot” at a coworker to whatever the last stupid thing Charlie Sheen did before he got shitcanned.

03.29.11 at 8:48 am

Sous Chef Gerard

Olive Garden has way more pressing issues beside their employees calling each other effeminate humans. I mean $10.99 for a chick parm? Too much.

H/T for the article. Well said.

04.26.11 at 7:49 pm

M

What about us lesbians? You didn’t add the storyline where Dawn Marie and Torrie made out, or when psycho Mickie wanted to get with Trish and kissed her. Damn those bitches were so hot, they made me wet. Bra and Panties were the best ;)